Futures from Nature Quotes

“E. M. Forster’s famous advice to “Only connect!” is beginning to look superfluous. A theory in which the building blocks of the Universe are mathematical structures—known as graphs—that do nothing but connect has just passed its first experimental test.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“Except for the cyanobacteria, the ocean’s cacophony of microscopic organisms has followed redwoods, mammoths, and Hallucigenia into extinction. The krill are gone. Krill would be of as little use to people as sharks and seabirds, fish or jellyfish, seashells or whales. They are all gone, too.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“castored chair”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“admitted (on live, prime-time TV, and in rounded Oxford tones) how much he liked Tolkien, and went on to describe in toothsome detail the sadomasochistic sexual cannibalism at the heart of Yeti religion. Postmodernist chatterati were left in agonies of indecision about which solecism was worse.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal

“Whatever the future may hold for Nature, its past—indeed, its very existence—owes much to religious and political discontent. In the nineteenth century, academics at the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were required to belong to the conventional Church of England. Those barred from these institutions for reasons of religion or politics—Catholics, Jews, atheists, and dissenters of every stripe—washed up, perhaps inevitably, in London, where, in 1828, University College was founded. It was a group of such London-based academics, centered on Thomas Henry Huxley—an early champion of Darwinian evolution—who found themselves with nothing to read. The group, known as the X Club (Ladies’ Night was known as the XYves), had been devotees of a periodical called The Reader. But when that folded, the X Club persuaded Scottish publisher Alexander MacMillan to underwrite a scientific magazine. And so, on November 4, 1869, Nature was born, and the MacMillan family has published it ever since.”
― Henry Gee, Nature Futures 1: Science Fiction from the Leading Science Journal